Re: How could RDDL be internationalised?

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 05:27 PM 19/01/01 +0000, Tony Coates wrote:

>Just looking through the RDDL spec today, I wonder if internationalisation
>(i-eighteen-n) was considered.  That is to say, I would want to be able to give
>a single resource multiple names in multiple languages.  

I don't think there's a problem.  In RDDL, a related resource has
machine-readable labels (in xl:role= and xl:arcrole=) and then 
the <rddl:resource> element contains a human-readable description.
Since this is XHTML, which includes the xml:lang= attribute, the
machinery is there to provide multiple human-readable descriptions.

One earlier draft of RDDL I believe contained non-normative
language encouraging the use of multilingual descriptions inside
rddl:resource; this is probably a good idea.

Now there's another issue, which is you could have two different
human-readable related resources which differ only in the human 
language they're presented in.  But I don't think it's cost-effective 
to try to solve that in RDDL. -Tim